What I'm Reading (& Watching & Listening to)

The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #62

The Farm Table by Julius Roberts—Julius Roberts lives the dream: He left the hustle and bustle of London restaurant life to start a small, old-world-style farm in the English countryside. As such, he of course lives in an adorable old English cottage and serves up delicious, from scratch food while raising an array of heritage breed pigs, goats and sheep. His first cookbook is sunny, beautiful to flip through, and full of farm-fresh yet stylish recipes.

If you never make a single recipe from the book, buy it for the beautiful photos alone.

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Book of Proverbs - Alabaster Bible—While you probably don’t need me to introduce you to the Book of Proverbs, this series may be new to you. Alabaster publishing breaks down the books of the bible into larger-sized printings that feel more like coffee table books with photos than biblical collections. I’ve been enjoying being able to pick up the book here and there, especially in the morning while drinking coffee, reading as much (or more accurately as little) as my children will allow me to and put it back down again with ease.

My one dislike, and truth be told it’s a significant one, is that I’m not crazy about the translation. I find it a bit too modern and digestible, but if that’s not a concern for you, then you might love this series.

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“Quiet in the Land”—This is the YouTube channel of Kaetlyn Anne, owner and creator of Calico and Twine, a semi-mysterious, rather magnetic online personality who focuses on homesteading life, from-scratch cooking, and living a quiet, simple life close to the land. I’ve been watching Kaetlyn’s videos on and off for several years now, revisiting them often for their calming and inspiring vibe.

Aside from her very earliest videos, she never shows her face, a form of shyness and modesty, and you watch her create her sourdough bread, preserve her garden vegetables in her homespun home to a kind of halcyon rhythm. In this day and age where everyone online is kind of right in your face, it’s a refreshing approach to creating content. She also has an online store, and you can find her on Instagram (when she reveals herself :=)

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The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life—It’s hard to express how much I’m enjoying this book. When I first came across Carl Jung’s work about twenty years ago, I felt an instant connection. It was as though the woo-woo side of me found the evidence it needed to approach the brainiac side and say, “See? I told you.” I have an affinity for the intellectual agrarian—the well-read, educated man or woman who also lives a life close to the land. In our day we seem to have cleaved these two things apart; the so-called thinkers are in the city at universities, supposedly, and it’s the “bumpkins” out in the country farming. But America especially has a rich tradition of well-read nature-lovers, and you can see it most profoundly of course in the founding fathers, who were nearly all farmers and all fiercely intelligent. A modern example is the American writer Wendell Berry, well-known for being a Kentucky farmer as well as a highly-respected essayist, poet and cultural critic.

Carl Jung, the famed Swiss psychologist, while not a farmer, possessed a love of nature and the natural world. He brought his deep insights into understanding our relationship to it, as well as the negative things that have happened to us since we’ve separated from it. Jung is best known for his theories on synchronicity and dream symbols and interpretation, as well as the concept of archetypes. But these writings are among the most powerful of his I’ve read, and I find myself underlining every other sentence.

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Caamp—A band that calls itself “a folk trio from Ohio making beautiful noise,” creates music with a soft, laid-back vibe that has a vintage tinge. I feel like I’m part way between the ‘70s and a bright, sunlit countryside when I listen to them. You’ll want to listen to them while you’re getting dinner ready, sitting around the campfire or taking an old-fashioned drive with the windows rolled down.

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And thanks for being here with me, truly.

xoxo,

Dolores